Tag Archives: Free-to-Play

Now that some of the dust has settled after the initial announcement of Clone States and CCP’s follow up Dev Blog it feels like the majority of folk that play EVE are optimistic about what the F2P Alpha Clones will bring to New Eden while being wary about about the ways they could be used to take advantage of game play situations. The two biggest concerns, which I’m totally on-board with, are:

The use of multiple Alpha Clone Alts.

The use of Alpha Clone Alts for High-Sec harassment/Suicide Ganking.

I know I’ll be taking advantage of having an Alpha Clone Alt and will take the advantage as many times as I’m legally allowed. As for the Suicide Ganking there are decent arguments coming from both sides and it looks like, at least for the initial release, CCP is leaning towards allowing it and I can understand their thoughts, they don’t way to limit the game-play available to the F2P crowd, but I’m going to predict that a month or so after Alpha Clones get to New Eden, probably just after they’ve had time to fully skill into the Catalyst, CCP will limit the Alpha Clone Safeties to Yellow while in High-Sec which will disallow their use in Suicide Ganking but still allow them to cause some trouble in High-Sec.

Was thinking about all the folks that will likely extend invites or start up new Corporations in anticipation of all the fresh New Eden’ers we’ll see when the Clone Grades go live and I’ve taken a look at the difference between the skills a brand new post Vanguard toon gets versus the proposed skills each maxed skilled Alpha Clone will have to get an idea of what it would take to build some sort of ‘Skill Book Welcome Package’. Not too surprisingly for each race it was very close… approximately 80,000,000 ISK to purchase all the Skill Books required for them to max out.

I’m going to go with the assumption that most Corporations will not invest 80,000,000 ISK into a brand new pilot but I’d bet they may be willing to invest in getting their new pilots skilled into the Destroyer and Cruiser sized hulls and into which ever weapon systems they can use.

If we use the Caldari Alpha Clone for an example they would need:

Caldari Cruiser

Caldari Destroyer

Heavy Assault Missiles

Heavy Missiles

Light Drone Operation

Light Missiles

Medium Hybrid Turret

Rockets

These eight Skill Books would cost less than 2,000,000 ISK, that’s not a bad investment to make in a new pilot and it’s one that would likely endear them to the Corporation that much more. You could even look at giving them a couple of inexpensive fitted ships to get rolling with – a couple of Frigates, one fitted for PvP and one fitted for PvE could not be overly expensive?

Force multiplication, in military usage, refers to an attribute or a combination of attributes that dramatically increases the effectiveness of an item or group, giving a given number of troops or weapons the ability to accomplish greater things than without. So we take a max-skilled Caldari Alpha Clone and throw them in a Blackbird and add one, two or three of them to our Alpha Toon Caracal fleet supported by our Alpha Toon Scythe logi.

One of the big issues with the Blackbird in that fleet is it’s speed, it’s significantly slower than the Caracal and Scythe, but if you’re pilots are smart they’ll stick themselves on the far side of your Logistics Wing and stay aligned to a bounce warping out when they get primaried.

In my messing with EFT I’ve been playing around with a max-skilled Caldari Alpha toon and it looks like they will have the skills to pilot a decently fit Caracal.

You can mess around a lot with the Caracal but this is a pretty standard small gang fit. For bigger fleets you could pull off the point and replace it with a resist and maybe pull the nano and add a third BCS.

What I will add to the discussion is that I’m stoked for this! I’m hopeful that we’ll see an influx of new players hit New Eden in November and I’m crossing my fingers with more hopes that we’ll see many of those NewBros stick around for the long haul.

I’ve already been messing around with the proposed Alpha Clone skills in EFT to see what a max skilled Alpha will be able to fly and will post some of those thoughts/fits in the coming days.